All the Flowers of the World
by SirenoftheStorm
Summary: A Tortuga prostitute reflects on her childhood and the reasons why she collects flowers. Response to the prompt "flower" on the Broken Compass forum.


AN: Written for the Broken Compass forum prompt "flower" and inspired by a book I read a few years ago, The Linnet Bird by Linda Holeman.

This was actually the first drabble idea that came to mind when I saw the two prompts of "Mary Sue" and "flower." I didn't intend to do the Mary Sue one, but that's somehow the one I ended up writing. Since I missed class and got really bored, I wrote out this one too.

This story is rated M for language and general references to underage sex. It's a rather horrible truth that in 18th century London, child prostitution was quite common and about as illegal then as jaywalking is now- technically against the law but neither strictly punished nor dilligently prevented.

Okay, now this is kind of a funny question, but is cock sucking one word or two? Or is it hyphenated? My spellcheck thinks it's two, but I vaguely recall seeing it as a compound word before. And now it keeps nagging at my mind and I end up randomly cracking up in giggles every time it resurfaces, because it is such an absurd question to be obsessing over.

Now will someone tell me why I'm always writing about prostitutes? Seriously, I just can't figure it out.

* * *

She was a whore, and she liked for men to bring her flowers.

She kept them pressed between the pages of a book that she kept hidden beneath the bed at her lodgings. The book contained a good many of them these days, dried and fragrant, and on nights when the memories became too vivid, she'd open the book and look at them until the screaming in her soul stilled and quieted. She could be strong, when she had to.

"Next time you come, bring me a flower from far away," she'd whisper to them as they lay, sated, in her arms. "A flower that doesn't grow here. I would like that very much."

And some of them did. Her book contained jasmine and lotus flower, tiger lily and hyacinth, bird of paradise and sunflower, cherry blossom and poppy, brought by men with clumsy hands and proud smiles and accepted as if they were pearls. One day, she hoped she might open the book and see all the flowers of the world laid out before her. _All the flowers of the world._

As a child, she'd been called Floressa. Her birth name, she did not know, for in her earliest memories, back in the workhouse, she'd been called only "child" or "you." She'd been named by the man who had bought her when she was still small enough that she'd talked with a slight lisp and had to fight the instinct to hide behind people's legs. He'd bought her for her big, long-lashed eyes and pale skin, but most of all for her dark red hair, a shade so vivid that at first glance, it looked unnatural. She was beautiful, he'd explained to her as they had walked back to his lodgings, her slender hand in his as she looked at everything with wide-eyed wonder, and he'd known the moment he'd seen her that she would make a splendid whore. This had confused her at first, because she'd thought of whoring as something only the very eldest girls at the workhouse had done, and even they had only spoken of it in whispers when around the others.

She was to be a different kind of whore, a special kind. The man who she was supposed to call 'Daddy' was not one of those men who preferred little girls to women, but he had seen the potential of catering to those who held such unusual predilections. Little Floressa, she'd been called, and dressed in pretty pinafores with her red hair in ringlets—the most precious of all the flowers of the world.

And there had been customers, oh, yes. The seedy underside of London held room for every kind of perversion. Growing up, she was dimly aware that in a faraway world, other girls were learning how to tell whether a luncheon dish was fully cooked through, while she learnt to discern without being told whether a customer wished her to beg for more or to beg him to stop. She was taught cock sucking at an age when other little girls were taught stitching and embroidery. And by and by, she had to be taught to play with dolls, for she'd not known what she was meant to do with them when she was given one, and some customers liked to see her engaged in innocent play before they took her aside for less innocent things.

She'd contrived to learn how to read, coaxing the knowledge from a schoolmaster who liked to play that she was one of his pupils. She could be clever, when she had to. She'd been careful to hide this knowledge from her 'Daddy', but every once in a while, if she were left to herself for a time in a client's house, she would look about the room to find any books to peer into and remind herself how the letters went together. She liked to read written words—so long and musical, so different from the street cant and coarse, foul language that filled the rest of her life. She'd even found herself a name in the biggest book, the one where all the words were kept, a word that meant 'red,' like her hair. Her 'Daddy' had laughed when she'd told him that she had a new name, laughed until her face was as red as her hair from anger and embarrassment.

"No, you'll stay my Floressa, my little flower, and you'll answer to whichever name your johns wish to call you. Don't you understand, girl? You're a plaything, a fuck toy. You're whomever they want you to be, Flower. No one cares who you think you are."

He was wrong. Many men were beginning to care for her a great deal. She was gaining new clients faster than she outgrew the tastes of the old ones. Most pretty children become ordinary adults, but a few of them grow into beauty. The brightness of her hair didn't fade, wouldn't fade until far into her thirties, and she was taller now, her voice less childish, her features more defined. The day she caught a glimpse of desire in her keeper's eyes as he looked at her, she knew that she had all she needed to secure her freedom.

Later she would guess her age to have been about thirteen or so when she seduced her pimp and dosed his ale with something that left him snoring on the floor. She'd left their tenement apartment with nothing but a heel of bread in her pocket and a battered book under her arm that she'd found a few months before discarded in an aleyway and kept hidden under her cot. She stopped in the street once, on a whim, to pick a flower that had grown up through a crack in the cobblestones and fold it between the pages. She'd earned passage on a ship the only way she knew how.

She'd had no illusions about what her life would be, away from her 'Daddy' and her old clients. She had none of the usual womanly skills—cooking, mending, sewing, washing, cleaning, child-nursing—with which to earn herself an honorable place as an ordinary girl might. No matter how far from London she might venture, there was but one career for which she was trained, and that was whoring. Well, then. It was the only life she knew, and she'd be content in it as long as she held the power over her money and clients. There were places in the far colonies where women were badly in demand and those who rented their services, even more so. A girl could make a fine living on her back in many settlements in the West Indies, she'd heard.

Many bright flowers grew there. She began to gather them in her book, a habit that became an obsession. When she had a specimen of every kind that could be picked on Tortuga, she began to ask her customers for some flower from far away. Until she had seen them all, all the flowers of the world, how could she be sure that she was not among them? How could she be sure that she was not Floressa, a flower, a toy, a thing to be picked and discarded? But until the day a man came to her with her own face in his hands, she wouldn't believe it.

Now, years later, she sat on her bed and paged through the book. Iris, daffodil, violet, peony, bluebell, orchid, lilac, rose. Poisonous oleander and healing briony, sweet gardenia and spicy carnation. She guessed there were hundreds of them. As she carefully closed the book around its fragrant burdens, she whispered the words she had said years ago, over her shoulder, as she'd stepped out of the ramshackle tenement apartment and into freedom.

"I'm not your flower. Fuck you, Daddy; my name is Scarlet."


End file.
